Corona Devotionals

My husband (and his friends when we are out of town) have been watering our garden religiously and daily and intentionally for many weeks. And...we are beginning to harvest some crops! Today my husband brought a lemon cucumber in from the garden.  It looked a little like an apple, or a tiny gourd, and the seeds inside were large.                                           But when I sliced it up to have with supper...do you know what it tasted like?   A cucumber. And sometimes I buy the long English cucumbers from the store, when I want to slice up cukes for salads or vegetable trays.   These cucumbers look nothing like the orb-shaped lemon cucumbers: instead, they are long and thin, and their seeds are tiny. But when I slice them up...do you know what they taste like?   Cucumbers. And once in a while, I will purchase mini-...

The very last book of the Bible: Revelation. We can admit (confess!) that we cannot explain much of what we read in its verses. We don't fully understand, and we can't fully comprehend Revelation ...until the prophecies within it come to pass one day. We don't understand exactly who the great prostitute is ( Revelation 17:1 ). We cannot explain who the woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns is ( Revelation 17:1 ). We can agree with John, the author of Revelation , when he writes in Revelation 17:5 that the name written on her forehead was a mystery : babylon the great the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth . We definitely don't understand what most of that means. We are also probably not sure how to interpret or understand the beast on which the woman rides which has the seven heads and ten horns (Revelation 17:7) . We are not uneducated or ignorant, and yet we cannot fu...

 If we spend any amount of time outside the walls of our home, or even inside...but watching the news or scrolling online, we eventually sense the darkness that sin has draped over this world.  Pain, violence, sadness, sickness, disillusion, and even the blatant denial of God are realities not only in the world, but in people. Sometimes it is so heavy, we seek escape.  We seek a place of safety. On a busy downtown street recently, we passed a street vendor with wall art displayed.  Each of the paintings was wild with color and shaky in lines and design, so as to represent/replicate/remind the viewer of being under the influence of a substance while viewing the "art".   The (many!) paintings made me sad, and then mad.   And at the end of the display of paintings sat (what looked to be) a homeless man.  He chattered loudly to no one that I could see.  And when we passed his area, he looked straight at me and asked me if I was a bird? ...

Ouch!!  Did you feel that?  (Or... have we felt that?) ...That prick  of God's Word into our heart, or that stab  of Scripture into our soul?  It hurts .  But it is pain with a purpose... God's purpose , and while it can stretch us to follow the Lord's lead, it will bless us to obey God in what His Word is teaching us. For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.  ~Hebrews 4:12 Have we felt the sharpness  of the  word of God lately, pressing against our sinful ways?  God tells us that His word  is quick and powerful , but sometimes we are slow and resistant to obey it.   And sometimes it almost doesn't even seem like sin , but it is merely something that we are stuck in , or a prisoner to.  However, if we have felt the Lord convi...

                                             ...But I never saw the good side of the city 'Til I hitched a ride on a river boat queen Big wheel keep on turnin' Proud Mary keep on burnin' Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river ~Proud Mary, Creedence Clearwater Revival You and I have the opportunity today to purchase space travel trips, for our own personal enjoyment. If we have the money, there are companies that provide commercial suborbital space tourism flights, allowing passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and to view Earth from the edge of space.  If we have the means, it's also possible to a rrange private astronaut missions to the International Space Station via SpaceX transport. These fantastic and "futuristic" travel options and realities are all possible today! And yet.... While our ...